I recently came across a site owner who was rather frustrated with the way his site is doing. He can’t seem to hit the traffic count he was aiming for, despite his extensive SEO campaign. One of the first questions he asked me was, “is SEO alone really enough to promote a site?”
The quick answer to this question is: no. SEO can bring you a lot of leads, get you the kind of exposure you want, increase your traffic and produce a wide range of various other results. However, SEO alone is not enough.
Is SEO Alone Enough?
Quality Content and Good Layout
You can bring thousands – even millions – of traffic to your site, but unless you have something to offer these people, they will simply come and leave almost immediately. This is part of the problems with the site I mentioned earlier. Although the site is superb SEO-wise, the contents are not appealing enough.
Yes, a few useful articles a week can help keep your site on top of search results for various keywords, but the articles must also be of value to your users for the whole campaign to work. Instead of just offering users something to read, offer users something they can truly benefit from.
The layout of the site must also be designed properly. A site that takes too much time to load is not a good site and will have less chance of succeeding. On the other hand, a site that displays long articles without visual elements will be very dull and uninteresting in the eyes of users. The key here is to find a nice balance between looks and performance.
Advertising and Promotions
SEO can attract over 50% of the traffic you get, but combining the campaign with a well-planned SEM campaign could produce an even better result. You can use advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Chitika and many others to further enhance the exposure your site is getting.
Promoting your site through other sites is also a good thing to do. Off-site SEO is just as important as on-site SEO. Writing guest posts, commenting on other people’s blogs and performing other simple tasks can really boost your site’s SEO performance by quite a long way.
Don’t hesitate to engage your viewers directly. Social networks provide you with the valuable opportunities to reach and interact with users directly. Instead of using social media to promote your site, take it a step further and use it to run games, quizzes and other promotional activities where users can get involved directly.
Reach Your Segment
Today’s SEO trends are shifting from global, generic SEO to local and highly targeted campaigns. You no longer need to target generic keywords and can instead focus on long-tail keywords that suit your target audience best. Go local, be more specific with your market segment and you will be able to improve your site’s SEO performance while at the same time get more relevant and interested visitors. Now that you have high quality contents to pamper them, keeping them from leaving immediately should be very easy to do.
